Funny how ubiquitous IM is, isn’t it? I even regularly IM my co workers who are right down the hallway from me. It’s easier to ping questions and check what the latest status of things are, without actually having to get up and gasp walk down several meters to his office. Then again, I casually chat with people around the world at all sorts of odd times.

My favorite program is Gaim. I like it for a number of reasons, but two primary ones are that it’s cross platform, so I can run it on my windows (at work) and linux (everything else) installations, and not have to familiarize myself with two different programs. (There’s not a version for mac, unfortunately, but I understand Adium is a derivation.) The second reason is that it is multi protocol, meaning that I can stash my AOL, Yahoo, Gmail, and other Jabber ID’s all in one spot, again instead of running a separate IM application for each account I’ve got.

About my only complaint, and the impetus for this post, is that Gaim does not yet support video (eg with a webcam). The developers say that it’s planned for 3.0, but inasmuch as we are just reaching 2.0 and there’s no timeline in place, I have no idea when this will come out. There was a gaim-vv fork at one point, but that seems to have disappeared, folded back into the main project for the later release.

Now it appears that using a webcam on Linux is slightly tricky, but to start with, one must at least have an IM application of some sort that supports it. Which led me to Kopete. Now, I’m willfully ignoring the little voice in my head that persists in saying “kaopectate” as I download this little puppy and check him out. [Interestingly, this project also shares configuration stuff with Adium, might check that out a bit.]

If you’re running ubuntu, kopete is readily available in the repositories and is advertised to understand video. I’ve been playing with it, and it’s a nice little piece of eye candy so far. I like the interface and the colours and such. The cutest part may be the excited cheerleader swirl you get in the system tray if you’ve got it all shut down off the desktop and you get an incoming message. It seems to be pretty robust all around, and although I like Gaim’s interface better (it’s much more compact in the chat panel), it seems pretty extensively customizable, so there’s probably a configuration I can find that I like.

(The webcam is currently in the mail somewhere between Amazon.com and me, so that part of the post is later.)

Kopete webcam Howto.